Dec 6, 2019
Roselee Goldberg Performance: A Hidden History
seen from Canada
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seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
Roselee Goldberg Performance: A Hidden History
Week 4: Media/Design
For this weeks reading response, I chose to read CH. 9 in the NFG book that talked about Media/Design. Media/Design is very important when trying to expose information from one person to another. We can communicate with others by using many types of communication, those being through media, verbally and nonverbally, through body language and well through other forms such as handwriting, print, telephone etc. Some things that the chapter also talks about is how a text’s design affects the way that it is received and understood. For example, pie charts and bar graphs are an easier way to show statistics and data rather than doing it in the form of paragraphs. It offers a much easier visual to the audience, while still containing important information.
Some questions that you should ask yourself when thinking about media are what medium are you using? Print? Electronic? Visual? Also, how does using the medium affect your overall organization? How does it affect the language and modes of expression? These questions are some of the things to keep in mind when making media. However, you must also think of the design. Things like the use of appropriate fonts, visuals, headings, and formats, such as APA or MLA, must also be considered.
The way that this relates to my major is that throughout my academic career, I am going to need to communicate with many people, using different types of communication. As a student that’s going into the medical field, communication is key, not only because you need to effectively communicate with others, but also because there will be many forms in which you will have to communicate by.
The reason as to why I chose this video is because here we see how Jim Carrey uses different kinds of communication, to “effectively” communicate with others. We see some body language involved, the use of facial expressions and also the use of different sounds he makes. To me this video is hilarious and I believe it shows how we can communicate using different ways, of course, this being by far the weirdest one, but it counts.
Reading response 4
That photography is the only art that is natively surreal does not mean, however, that it shares the destinies of the official Surrealist movement.Surrealism is a pure spiritual unconscious activity of human beings. People can express this real process of thought in oral, written or other ways - free movement of thought without any control of rationality and without any aesthetic or moral prejudices. Based on Henri Bergson's said. people's most real feelings can be in the subconscious and dream. In contemporary art, the most obvious inheritance of surrealist style is contemporary photography. Many photographers choose to use different means to express their fantastic dreams, to create their "surreal". Camera has become a powerful tool for capturing fantasy images because of its instantaneous grasping ability and the virtual and real methods of real reproduction of the object. This method of shooting is called surreal photography. Artists use photography to express their own artistic conception different from others. They mostly follow Dali's grotesque wind and express some strange scenes that can not be seen in the objective world.
“Unlike the fine-art objects of pre-democratic eras, photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist.”In the art market, Impressionist and contemporary works of art always have higher auction prices and better market conditions. But in recent years, the international art market has gradually turned its attention to surrealist works.
“Painting was handicapped from the start by being a fine art, with each object a unique, handmade original.Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.”
what difference between painting and photography? no matter which painting method or school of expression you are based on, the essence of the image you see as a painting is the subjective product of human beings. At the same time, it also shows that the essence of painting techniques includes the understanding and expression of the objective world. whether I am drawing the objective things in front of me or the abstract images in my brain, as a painting technique, I have the first level of expression, while the image content served by the painting technique is the second level of expression.
The process of photography is quite different. The essence of photography is strictly objective. It is a way to grasp the objective world. We recall the principle of photography. Its essence is to project the light of the objective world into the "dark box" through the lens, and then record all this through the negative (photosensitive elements).
In this way, the emergence of photography has become an impact on painting. Because even drawing closer to objective reality is not as objective as photography. Even though photography can achieve the goal of subjective narration by controlling and modifying the picture, it is also based on its objective nature.
Response to Dangerous Border Crossers
Throughout this excerpt of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s work Dangerous Border Crossers, he explores the different realms in which art (and artist) exist and interact. He describes borders, both literal and figurative, that create divisions many struggle to navigate. Performance art for Gómez-Peña is powerful because of the freedom that comes with uncertainty and lack of restriction: “a conceptual territory that grants us special freedoms (aesthetic, political and sexual) often denied to us in other realms…” (51). His descriptions of performance pieces characterize the actual performances themselves as border crossers, facing different challenges from members of the art world than from "involuntary audiences." One of the main intentions is to step outside of the art world entirely, and in this way, “venture into unfamiliar territory” (51). The work itself interacts with audiences differently in different contexts partially because of the people who occupy those spaces, but also because of the social/political meaning of the locations themselves. In this sense, the shifting of setting shifts the meaning of the piece as well, and the work takes on its own meaning from what Gómez-Peña calls “the friction created by these overlapping worlds” (52).
In the description he gives of “The Cruci-Fiction,” one of his famous public interventions, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes symbolically crucify themselves on wooden crosses in front of an invited audience in San Francisco. Dressed as “undocumented bandito” and “generic gang member” respectively, the crucifixion was representative of the actual lived discrimination and abuses against Latinx people. They performed this piece to spark a media buzz, but actually endangered themselves in the process by remaining on the crosses for three hours. The interaction from the audience with the work was meant to be the realization that they had to take action and get the men down but this became evident much later than the performers had expected. While it was provocative, Gómez-Peña recounts his doctor pointing out his “heroic stupidity” (53) in coming close to death for the sake of the performance.
When reading the descriptions Gómez-Peña gives of performance art in general and of his own pieces, it is difficult to reconcile the intrigue and discomfort that I feel. While I think that the importance of the work is obvious theoretically, it is hard for me to swallow the horror in imagining these men dying in front of an audience in the name of art. As a political performance piece, “The Cruci-Fiction” was successful in creating international publicity, but at what cost to the performers? At what cost to the audience? Though they escaped relatively unscathed, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes had put their lives in the hands of an unsuspecting audience whose inaction had almost made them spectators to the death of the performers. This brings up a lot of questions regarding complicity and responsibility for me, and while I understand the symbolism, I cannot shake the feeling of disturbance this leaves me with. Performance art is clearly compelling and complicated, especially in the navigation of the different spaces it occupies. This being said, Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s piece leaves me unsettled. Does the end justify the means? Does he even know?
Juan Freire
This reading was interesting because it really related to a class I took while abroad called Urban Culture. Not only does Juan Freire’s work take place in Spain, which is where I went abroad, but it also directly relates to the content of the class. The reading explains:
“thoughts about public space, whether it is obsolescent or necessary, what is the meaning of the expression in the 21st century, and what could happen should public space as we know it disappear.”
My class on Urban Culture discussed the different uses of physical public space, but I’ve never thought about the digital public space as a part of that as well. In my class, we talked about how having different things and layouts in public spaces could affect what type of people come to them and what uses they use them for. Freire communicates the same points about the digital public spaces as well.
The idea of surveillance has been one that has been prevalent throughout the course. It directly relates to the notion or privacy. I think that in the digital age, nothing is every private. All of our information is online and we give it out willingly. We order clothing, post photos on social media, and pay our bills online. Snowden talks about Cryptology - the science of secrecy. We do a lot to try and protect our information. We encrypt files, password protect our accounts. But at the end of the day our information is still on a computer and still susceptible to hackers. There is still a way to decrypt any file if you have the key. Snowden talks about how computers are incapable of truly random behavior. In computer science, we talk about how we can never really generate a “random” number, it’s only pseudorandom. Snowden describes humans as “pattern-recognition machines”. I think this is an accurate description, as we tend to search for and perceive patterns even when none exist. Snowden then starts talking about using the stars and the universe as a form of cryptology. Using the pulse interval from a singular star could encrypt a file, and make it nearly impossible to decrypt unless you knew which star it was. The concept itself honestly sounds insane. But I don’t know anything about astronomy, so who knows.
How we're still doomed: Colonization of our information and lives
"...the problem with the Snowden archive is that you never find an easy answer. Documents lead to other documents, one NSA program will point to another. Code names obscure specific companies and technological capacities." -Crawford
This quote reveals a serious issue with archives, which is the question of their accessibility. The information that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, was an effort to liberate and decolonize the information that the NSA was extracting from us. Although the idea sounds commendable, how much can we say what Snowden provided us with was worth it? Was it really effective in accomplishing a liberation of information, if we are not able to make sense of the information that was made available? After doing this reading, I believe that we are currently in a state where our information, our entire private lives, has been colonized by the NSA, corporations, etc. Furthermore, I believe that simply revealing this truth, is no longer enough. If we consider how massive the data that has been collected on us is, then we can start to realize how these corporations have been playing the long game. These corporations, have most likely been gathering this information for quite some time now, and as a result, it has had enough time, to prepare for things, such as Snowden in 2013. The ambiguous titles of projects, the massively intimidating amount of information, and other factors continue to leave us in a state of inaccessibility. As organizations continue to gather more information about us, they are able to develop more effective strategies of making us oblivious to it all.
Astro Noise
The first thing I realized about Edward Snowden’s essay was the juxtaposing content and language. The voice used his essay was narrative and poetic, yet the information is scientific. It seemed like science fiction, but there was a strong reality to it. I found this connection between technology and the stars to enhance cryptography, or hiding information, making it “indistinguishable from random noise to all except the rightful owner.” Snowden states computers are incapable of random behavior alone. Thus, pseudorandom generators must be programmed for computers, but the sky is limitless of truly random seeds. If we listen to the stars, maybe by the way they pulse, and use this for encryption, we could further complex coded information. Astro Noise could outsmart any human who dared to decipher the code.
When reading Kate Crawford’s essay, I realized I never thought about how the documents Snowden released would be difficult to search through and some information may be encrypted. I really enjoyed the comparison Crawford made between the search engine for Snowden’s database and the Oracle. There were many similarities, demonstrating once more how old, even ancient, concepts have evolved with modern technology. Stories involving the Oracle typically taught lessons or cautioned others. Crawford makes a wonderful connection to this at the end of the essay when she states the lasting cautions for the era of global surveillance are still being learned.